Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (18 page)

Iron Mike mixing it up with 49ers fans at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. December 15, 1987

Mike Ditka played his last game for the Bears in 1966. His final years in Chicago were miserable. He felt unappreciated, unloved. He’d given his knees and hips and youth to the team, but Halas refused to pay him what he was worth. “I never understood why he never saw my value for the way I played for him,” Ditka told Jeff Davis, author of
Papa Bear
. “I played hard for him. I’m not even saying I played good for him. I played hard. Every down, I played hard…” When Halas learned that Ditka had been involved in negotiations with the Houston Oilers of the rival American Football League, and had been paid, he cut Ditka’s salary 10 percent. That’s when Iron Mike spoke those piercing words: the old man throws around nickels like they’re manhole covers. “I think it was at a banquet,” Ditka said. “I’ll tell you one thing: you couldn’t say much in Chicago that Mr. Halas didn’t know about. It would come back to him. He had a powerful network of people … It made Halas furious when he heard about it.”

Ditka signed his last Bears contract the following summer: $25,000 for one season. He got that much only by threatening to hold out; he would skip training camp, even the season. Halas still refused. In the end, it was Mugs who inked the deal. “As you got to know [Halas], you found out he played a game with people and knew how to play it as good as anyone,” Ditka said. “He was crafty. He had a way to maneuver and manipulate and change and end up getting it done the way he wanted it done. I guess all great people do.”

The final blowup came in 1967. It resulted from a bit of loose talk. “The thing that really made [Halas] mad was once I called him a cheap Bohemian,” Ditka wrote later. “He came right to me. I was getting dressed and he called me in and asked me about it. But I said I just said it in jest. I told him I could have called him a cheap SOB but the Bohemian thing was something I was just being cute with. He said, Don’t be cute with my nationality. I said, It’s like you saying I’m a dumb Polack or something. Why would that bother me? He was right, though. It was a stupid thing to say. Those are things you do when you are young and trying to be cute.”

Ditka had inadvertently violated one of Halas’s principles. He believed in freedom, hard work, winning. He did not believe in ethnic determination. It’s what made him a great coach, open to anyone who could play. If I’m cheap, he might say, it’s because I lived through the wars and the Depression and was forced to learn the value of a dollar, not because my ancestors came from Czechoslovakia.

By the end of the week, Ditka had been traded to Philadelphia, a graveyard for players. Halas did not just want to get rid of Ditka; he wanted to bury him. Many Bears fans mark the start of the team’s decline to this trade, which sent the club’s heart and soul to the Eagles for quarterback Jack Concannon.

The Philadelphia years were the worst of Ditka’s career. “I cried like hell,” he said. His family stayed in Chicago, meaning Mike was out there, tired, wounded, alone. The Eagles were awful. The games were awful. Ditka spent much of his time cursing on the bench. “I’m sure if there is such a thing as purgatory on earth, I was in it there,” he said. He haunted the local bars, staring at his face in the mirror. It was one of those trials that come in every life, a moment in which you know, just know, that if you weaken or lose focus, you’ll be washed away by malaise, slide into dissolute wandering. Why not sit down on the riverbank with this bottle, just for a minute, an hour, a short nap beneath the trees? “The whole year was a real low point,” he said. “I had an apartment in downtown Philadelphia. My family was still in Chicago. Basically, every night I would go out. I drank a lot. I was not playing and it was just ridiculous. I was about to kill myself with the drinking. I was in bad shape. Nothing else to do. I was a mess.”

In the Ditka scheme of things, a man needs only himself—determination and will should be enough to get anyone through. And yet, when he touched bottom in Philly, it was not self-love or zipperoo that saved Iron Mike: it was a voice on the phone, another human being reaching out across the dark. “I would have quit the game if Landry hadn’t called,” Ditka told me. Tom Landry, the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, had a tremendous effect on anyone lucky enough to fall in his orbit. (Note all the Texans named Landry.) He spoke with a twang, his voice sharp but encouraging. He said, “Mike, this is Tom Landry over in Dallas. Now you tell me the truth, Mike: Do you think you’ve got anything left?”

You show a man at sea a raft, he will swim for it.

Ditka stopped drinking, stopped carousing. He spent months running and lifting weights, living like an ascetic. When he showed up at Cowboys training camp in 1969, he was in great shape, ready to give the orange one more squeeze. He would play four seasons in Dallas, nearly as many as he’d played in Chicago. It was a gift that allowed him a late-career florescence, the sort afforded only to those who are lucky. He described them as “the best years I ever played.” He did not make as many catches as he had in Chicago, but he was thrown the ball in key situations. On January 16, 1972, Ditka caught a touchdown in the Super Bowl, a Roger Staubach pass that found him in the end zone.

These seasons reframed Ditka’s career, completed it. If he’d retired in Philly, if his story had ended there, sadly, in a bar, he would have been remembered as a buzz cut from the sixties, a product of a certain time and place, a one-act athlete frozen in black and white. But in Dallas, he made the transition to the full-blown, woolly 1970s, where he became a beefy, mustachioed Cowboy surrounded by hippies. “Everything was radical,” he said. “Nobody wanted the Vietnam thing. Everybody had their own philosophies. Everybody was against the government. It was a different breed of person coming out.… Then all of a sudden we got that smell around the locker room. We would say, ‘What the hell’s that smell?’ … I guess it was called hemp or rope.”

The end came slowly, then all at once. “I had lost weight,” said Ditka, “my back was killing me.” He’d lost speed, too, and some of the fearlessness that had always been crucial to his performance. It’s a matter of split seconds. At the beginning, you hit, then think; at the end, you think, then hit. “You [believe] it’s going to last forever,” he said. “You figure the Good Lord gave you this body and it’s going to keep working and it’s not going to get hurt. You’re going to wake up every day with enough enthusiasm to say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to play the game.’ All of a sudden, after you’ve been doing it for eight or nine years, even if you’re healthy, then the mind starts playing tricks on you. It makes it tough. You start saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to catch that one coming inside…’”

Before a game against San Francisco, Ditka pushed back his chair and tried to get up from a poker table but couldn’t stand. His back locked, the pain came in waves. A few days later, he went into Landry’s office:
That’s it, Coach. I’m done.
Then, a few days after that, as Ditka was wondering what he might do next, he got his second life-shaping call from Landry.
Do you want to work with the receivers, Mike?
Perhaps no one else would have considered Ditka for such a position. A coach is supposed to be even-tempered, rational, sane. Ditka was a hothead, a tantrum thrower. One night, after not liking his hand in a game of cards, he ripped a deck in half. You have to be incredibly strong to do that—and also a little nuts. But Landry recognized a quality in Ditka, the way he seemed to motivate everyone around him. He became the Cowboys’ special teams coordinator. He could be seen screaming on the sideline, throwing a clipboard, kicking a cooler. The mustache was there, the polyester pants, the whistle, the turf shoes, the temper. Around the league, he was accused of schooling his players in dirty tricks. “We teach that when you come to block you close your fists and come up with your hands underneath the guy’s solar plexus and hit him in the stomach,” Ditka said. “It stops you from being called for holding and helps you deliver a blow. Nothing illegal about it.”

“Mike was black-and-white,” said Danny White, a Cowboys quarterback and special teams player. “There was no gray area. He yelled at me once after I shanked a punt. He was used to yelling at kickers. I yelled back at him. I said, ‘Yeah, right, Mike, I did it on purpose. Fine me.’

“We played a lot of racquetball,” White went on. “It was a great way to stay in shape. Rafael Septien, our kicker, and I would play [Coach] Dan Reeves and Mike, two of the most competitive human beings. Rafael was an A-plus player, coming from Mexico. I was pretty good. They couldn’t beat us. Their only chance was to bang us around, intimidate us. Mike would finally reach the point where he wouldn’t even aim at the wall. He would aim at Rafael. My plan was to stay away from Rafael because Mike might miss Rafael and hit me. And Mike would hammer the ball. He’d drill it at you. It really hurt. He didn’t care. He wanted to drive you to the point where you quit. Not a finesse guy, a bull in a china closet. That’s the way he played football, and it made him a great coach. There was no middle ground. You either get the job done, or you were gone.”

Landry taught Ditka how to coach, how to lead, even how to live. He taught him to internalize his fury, play a long game:
You don’t have to tell everyone what you think every time, Mike!
“If there is a compassionate side to Mike, it’s because of Landry,” White told me. “Ditka learned professionalism from Landry. He learned that, as a coach, you have to control your passions. I think those years in Dallas made Ditka a coach. It calmed him down.”

When I laughed at this—it’s hard to imagine anyone less calm than Ditka in the third quarter, down by ten points—White said, “Yeah, try to imagine Ditka without the influence of Landry. He would have been a raving lunatic. So I think, believe it or not, Landry had a huge effect. He helped Mike control his emotions. A normal person loses their composure and screams at someone, then feels bad. But Mike never felt bad. Until Landry. Then he began to realize, hey, these are human beings. He still yelled, but now he felt a little remorse. He might not apologize, but he felt it.”

Ditka coached nine seasons in Dallas. While there, he was akin to the young Moses, a phony Egyptian prince living in the wondrous palace of Pharaoh. His life was good, his future assured, but he was not with his people, not fulfilling his destiny. When the Cowboys faced the Bears, he caught himself wishing that he was on the other sideline: Moses feeling a strange rush of sympathy when the overseer clubbed the Hebrew slave.

In 1981, the circuit filled with rumors: the Bears would soon fire their head coach, Neill Armstrong. That’s when Ditka made his move: “I wrote Halas a letter,” Ditka said. “It was a simple letter. I just said I wanted to renew our friendship. I told him I knew he had experienced some troubled times. I said, ‘I just want you to know if you ever make a change in the coaching end of the organization, I just wish you would give me some consideration.’ That’s all. It was a very nice letter.”

Why was George Halas still running the Bears?

After Halas retired from the bench, he stepped away from the front office as well, turning the operation over to George Jr. A dark-haired man, Mugs spent much of his life in his father’s shadow, following him up and down the sideline, hanging helmets in the dank locker rooms of the old NFL. He joined the Bears front office as soon as he graduated from Loyola University on Chicago’s North Side. Mugs had two children and two wives. When the first wife filed for divorce, she cited “mental cruelty.” According to the
New York Times
, she claimed, “Football took precedence over our marriage and our children.”

Mugs might’ve been brilliant, but you’d never have known, as his story was so completely overwhelmed by his father’s. Part of this is likely because Senior outlived Junior, always a tragedy: Mugs died on the last day of the 1979 football season. According to an autopsy, he’d suffered a massive coronary; he was fifty-four. The news was kept off the radio until the old man could be found. Tim McCaskey, Virginia’s son, was dispatched to tell his grandfather. The situation was biblical. It was about patriarchy. Halas had one male heir. Everything depended on him. Mugs would carry the name, the team, and the spirit into the next century. This was the old man’s legacy. The future was an abstraction, but Mugs was real. Until he wasn’t.

With Mugs’s death, logic would seem to dictate the ascension of Ed McCaskey, the only other family member who worked in the executive suite. But logic would also dictate an end zone nowhere near a brick wall, retiring Butkus’s jersey, and a postgame pep talk more eloquent than “You’re all a bunch of cunts.” “[Mugs’s death] set the Old Man back dramatically,” said Jerry Vainisi, who had served as team treasurer since 1972 and would take over as general manager after Jim Finks. “His whole preordained plan was to live forever. If the unconscionable happened that he died, certainly Mugs would run the club and live forever. It was
never
to go through the McCaskey family. Part of it was the Latin primogeniture, that everything goes to the oldest male, plus he was the one running the team.”

At eighty-five, Halas announced his return to the helm, saying, “Only a Halas can run the Bears.” It was a jolt. Here was this relic—was he really still alive?—of the ancient leather-head days returning to a game that had long since passed him by. Stan Jones, who played guard and defensive tackle for the Bears, compared it to “Orville Wright coming back to run United Airlines.” Halas reasserted control, firing or isolating many of the people closest to Mugs. In January 1981, he called Ditka, who, years later, still remembered the old man’s exact words: “Kid, this is George Halas. I want you to get on an airplane and fly to O’Hare. Don’t tell anybody. Take a [car] and come to my place at 5555 N. Sheridan.”

Halas was called the old man even when he was young. He was eighty-six when he reached out to Ditka, grouchy, grizzled, heartbroken. He told Mike to travel in absolute secrecy. The press, the big shots, the sportswriting bums—none of them were to know anything. “It was like foreign intrigue,” Ditka said. “[Halas’s assistant] Max Swiatek picked me up in a black Lincoln Town Car. He drove me to Mr. Halas’s apartment, and we went upstairs and sat at the kitchen table. The first thing he said, and I always remember this, was, ‘Tell me about your coaching philosophy.’ I said, ‘Coach, what do you want me to do? Bullshit ya? My coaching philosophy is the same as yours: I want to win.’”